Everybody Hates Trump Now | The New Republic
Today, barely six months after Trump’s second term, things seem very different. Voters still hate Democrats: a Monday Wall Street Journal Poll revealed that 63% of voters had an unfavorable vision of the party, the lowest figure ever recorded. But, more and more, voters also hate Trump. A lot. And it is not only its new voters: Trump’s Maga’s base shows signs of vacating for the first time since the January 6 insurgency, thanks to its controversy management on the files of the Ministry of Justice linked to the deceased financial Jeffrey Epstein, the condemned pedophile and accused the sexual trafficker who was a close friend of Trump for almost two decades. Wherever you look at, Trump’s support collapses.
The Credule Beltway Press has long represented Trump as a genius of singular marketing: the “Michael Jordan of the names” and the provider of political goods in the country (hats with slogans of 40 years on them). There is a touch of truth to that; Trump has a barnumesque talent for having aroused attention, and his tendency to play the crowd means that he can make tricks around most group messages. But he has always been overestimated. The nicknames are almost all clumsy and worthy of packaging (just look “panican”); His political slogans have a remarkably low success rate (likewise). In both cases, his winners – or at least those who have a long shelf life, such as “Build The Wall”, “Croooked Hillary” and “Make America Great Again” –Return to the first days of his first presidential race.
Trump’s true talent is not to move the voters where it is, but identify where the voters are – then say what other political leaders are too afraid of saying. Its rapid increase in the Republican Party came from the simple recognition that party voters were considerably further right on immigration than most of the party’s presidential candidates. Trump returned to voters of what they already said about undocumented immigrants, and he quickly increased in the polls. More recently, Trump succeeded by pushing messages that resonated with groups whose loyalty to the Democratic Party was far from absolute. In 2024, he argued that the political elite was disconnected; that you needed young people, black and Latinos; And that he – gave his unorthodox foreign policy, to describe it favorably – could end the genocide in Gaza. He also cleverly aligned with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a Scion of the most famous Democratic family in the country whose base was vaguely correlated with the support of Democrats: Trump won his approval by promising him real power, and probably won a large number of votes accordingly.
